An open letter to the mother of my high-school girlfriend

Remember back in the summer of '79 how you told your smokin' hot seventeen-year-old daughter--let's call her "Jo"--that she couldn't date me anymore because I was a bad seed? Even after I came to your home for dinner and was really, really polite, even when you said that you hoped that everything you'd heard about me wasn't true? And I just kind of smiled like a doofus even though I knew I was being abused, because what was I gonna say, "Same to you"? I even agreed to go to church with Jo just to prove that lightning wouldn't strike me (I wasn't totally sure), and I drove her and her sister in my red van, and they must have told you about it, because the next day Jo told me she couldn't see me any more.

Do you remember that?

And you probably also remember that Jo was upset about it, because--I don't know if you knew this, or cared, but--we really, honestly liked each other. I thought Jo was the sweetest person in the entire universe. It took me three dates to even kiss her, and two more to French kiss. Okay, you didn't like that part of the relationship, but, you know what? That first night that Jo and I French kissed in your driveway, and you turned on the porch light and opened the front door for her to end the date and come inside? Man, that was the greatest night of my life to that point. You tried your best to ruin it, but you didn't even come close.

I liked her so much that even after we broke up, I was like, "The hell with your mom, man, we're like Romeo and Juliet," and I honestly believed that we were just gonna ride out the storm.

But then Jo stopped returning my calls, and the next time I talked to her she was telling me about some weird ceremony at her church where she had to wear a white dress and get dunked in water, and I was like, "Oh, crap, this is like in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' when Jack Nicholson gets lobotomized." And that's when I realized that you won, Nurse Ratched.

So anyway, to catch you up on my life, I wrote this cute little baby book that was inspired by how much I love my own kids, and how being a parent pretty much trumps everything else in life. And this week I started noticing that it was showing up in the computer algorithms as being bought by people who also buy "My First Bible."

I laughed when I saw that, because it reminded me of you all of a sudden, and how much I hated you when I was seventeen. I realized, you know, maybe in retrospect we aren't so different after all.

And then I thought, "Nah, I still hate your guts."

Anyway, you were on my mind today. Thought I'd share.